What’s with the fire hydrants?

Aug 27, 2013 Editorial

These past few weeks the nation was focused on the Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project. Everyone was talking about the huge sums of money that the project was costing. At the same time they were also talking about the huge sums being spent on projects designed to take Guyana into the Twenty-first century.
The country had already spent in excess of US$200 million on the Skeldon Sugar Factory that is intended to lower the production cost and to make Guyana’s sugar competitive on the world market. Then there are the millions being spent on the Marriott Hotel.
Untold millions are being spent on other projects but what should demand the expenditure of other sums appears to be neglected. Georgetown must be the only capital with hardly working fire hydrants. It is not that the government has not spent money on hydrants. In fact, millions of dollars worth of hydrants is lying in the compound of the Shelter Belt because there is something wrong with them.
A few months ago, the Guyana Fire Service made a big show of activating the hydrant on Charlotte Street outside the High Court and the City Hall. There was another test on another hydrant somewhere in the city but for the greater part these hydrants are not working.
The authorities may not see the importance of the hydrants but the poorer people in the society are feeling the effects. These past few days saw three homes going up in flames. What is worse is that two children died. The people in the neighbourhood reported that they waited on the Guyana Fire Service but by the time the first tender arrived the house had been razed. It was old and the wood did not take long to go up in flames.
Indeed, when the issue of the hydrants first surfaced there was the usual talk about who should be responsible for the hydrants. The Guyana Water Authority insisted that the fire hydrants are the responsibility of City Hall.
City Hall indeed was once responsible for the distribution of water in the city but the government saw fit to remove the water distribution aspect of its duties from City Hall. It then became the responsibility of a pseudo Government entity that had its own Board of Directors.
To this day, the passing game continues and the people of Guyana continue to be left at the mercy of fires. Fortunately for some, the construction some two hundred years ago with the myriad waterways has been a blessing although many of the waterways are fast clogging up.
One would expect that the Municipality, indeed, would be responsible for all the hydrants in its jurisdiction. However, Guyana is an aberration. The government controls the Municipality, determines how it manages its staff, by how much it could raise taxes if indeed there is any tax hike and whether it could attract funding outside of the taxes that the citizens pay.
Since things are the way they are, one would expect that in the same breath that the government is spending more than US$50 million on the Marriott, where one is certain there would be more than a large number of working hydrants, there would have been an expenditure on the hydrants.
Of course, there is need to improve the water distribution system. The Inter-American Development Bank has been funding some water rehabilitation in Guyana but Georgetown has never been able to improve its system in any meaningful way.
The people, having concentrated their objections on the Amaila project, should now turn that very attention to issues closer to home. For one, when a fire strikes, unless the homeowners are filthy rich or the home is very well insured, there is a small likelihood that there would be any rebuilding. The family is often reduced to paupers and mendicants. There have been cases of people running mad.
It is indeed strange that attention has not been paid to the fire hydrant situation. We have allowed it to collapse over the past five decades when all it would have taken was some money for constant rehabilitation of the system.

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What’s with the fire hydrants?

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